My experience as chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program enabled me to develop a practical approach with regard to the scope and function of the congressional committee as an instrument of government.

It is natural for a person whose actions have been questioned to resent being required to account for what he has done. This is true of individuals in government and business when they are subjected to congressional examination. They resort to many subterfuges to avoid or restrict investigation.

Many highly useful jobs have been done by committees of the Congress. The nation has benefited immensely from their work. Sometimes, however, they have been hampered by the claims of some administrators that such investigations were taking too much of their valuable time - that they were already working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on affairs of more importance to the nation. This attitude was often taken by agency heads during the war. The implication was that it would have been much better to abolish most of the committees and to leave the busy administrators free to act as their best judgment dictated.

I do not agree with that attitude. High-ranking administrators often appear before congressional committees at their own request. Since my committee was interested only in obtaining the facts, it would have preferred to get the testimony of witnesses who personally had firsthand knowledge of the facts. We were willing to hear the high-ranking administrators themselves, however, if they preferred to attend, but we seldom requested their testimony.

It is common practice among government officials to attend hearings rather than to content themselves with supplying the facts. They often do so because they wish to take advantage of such occasions by making public statements that consist of long, carefully prepared arguments in their own behalf. These are often mimeographed and distributed to the press, sometimes before the respective committee has even seen them.

The argument that different congressional committees unnecessarily duplicate each other’s work is, in my opinion, overemphasized. Some duplication does exist, and much of it is unnecessary. Congress could properly reorganize itself into fewer committees, each with a competent staff, and thereby eliminate some duplication and increase the efficiency of its work. However, it should be borne in mind constantly that one of the principal purposes of an investigation is to obtain and disseminate information so that as many as possible of the members of Congress will have the background necessary for intelligent decisions with respect to legislation.

Also, what looks like duplication because it deals with the same general subject may not be duplication at all. The subject may be so broad in scope that one committee may be investigating for the purpose of determining whether the administrators are competent, and another committee may be trying to determine whether specific legislation to grant additional powers is necessary.

I formed the conviction, however, that certain rules and conditions should be imposed on an investigating committee by the body from which it issues. For example, it should be stated clearly what the power of the committee is to be. The committee chairman should be carefully chosen. He, in turn, should be given every encouragement to select an investigator or counsel who is dependable, able, and above reproach. The committee should concentrate on uncovering facts. At public hearings, the committee should know exactly what it wants to find out from each witness.

Witnesses should be interviewed in advance of public hearings so that they may present their case to the committee and so that the committee members may ask pertinent questions. Members not present when these previous interviews are held must, of course, be free to ask questions at the public hearing. A witness should be permitted to answer questions normally, and if he balks, he should be prodded by the record. If an investigation fails in its objective to amass knowledge for legislative purposes, it is a waste of time and public money.

Many congressional committees, in the past and in recent times, have been guilty of departing from their original purposes and jurisdictions. The most outstanding example of a misdirected investigation occurred during the Civil War when the Committee on the Conduct of the War attempted to direct military operations in the field. It was this committee that was responsible for making Pope commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, which proved to be an unfortunate decision. Although it was said that, with Pope in command, the army’s headquarters would be in the saddle, his appearance on the field was soon followed by the disaster of the Second Battle of Bull Run. Horace Greeley made the remark that the headquarters was in the saddle, to be sure, and that Pope had been sitting on his brains.

This Committee on the Conduct of the War abused witnesses unmercifully. In reading the reports of the hearings of that committee, I was made ashamed of the Congress because of the way General Meade was abused after the drawn battle at Gettysburg. History has since shown that his performance in that turning point of the war was above reproach, but the members of the committee tried to make it look as if he were a traitor for not pursuing Lee’s retreating army, when the truth was that his troops and supplies were too exhausted and depleted for any such task.

The special committee never discussed military strategy, although we took testimony from many generals and admirals. The military policy of the United States was entrusted to the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and not to any congressional committee. Senators Brewster and Vandenberg tried at times to make another Committee on the Conduct of the War out of our committee by attempting to bring the Congress into control of the operations of the military establishment, but we never permitted that to happen.

I consider the methods used by the House Committee on Un-American Activities to be the most un-American thing in America in its day. The committee had completely forgotten the constitutional rights of the individuals who appeared as witnesses. It made the same mistake as the special committee created in 1859 to investigate John Brown’s rebellion: After full-scale war broke out, that committee finally realized it had been picking on the wrong people and making the wrong investigations.

When Pat McCarran became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that group also began to overstep the bounds of its own authority and to change from its original purpose. In its treatment of witnesses, the McCarran Committee became more of an inquisition than an investigation.

Another misdirected inquiry was conducted by the Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry prior to the outbreak of World War II. Under the chairmanship of Senator Gerald P. Nye, this committee made it appear that the munitions manufacturers had caused World War I, and as a result, the Neutrality Act was passed. Because this law placed an embargo on arms shipments to the democratic forces in Spain, it was partly responsible for our losing that country as a potential ally in World War II. The Nye Committee, which was backed by isolationists and “America Firsters,” was pure demagoguery in the guise of a congressional investigating committee.

There has been increasing public understanding, I believe, of the necessity for intelligent and energetic investigation by the Congress of the activities of administrative agencies as well as of segments of the American society outside the government. In the future, there will undoubtedly be more, rather than fewer congressional investigations, and the benefits which the public will obtain from these should be very great. The power of the Congress to investigate may become equal to, if not more important than, its power to legislate.

Early in 1944, some of my friends began to suggest to me that I become a candidate for Vice President. I had never entertained such an idea, and whenever the suggestion was made I brushed it aside. I was doing the job I wanted to do; it was one that I liked, and I had no desire to interrupt my career in the Senate. As the time for the Democratic convention drew closer, however, my name was mentioned frequently as a possible candidate for the nomination. This disturbed me, for I had repeatedly given notice that I did not want to be a candidate.

In July 1944, as I was about to leave my home in Independence for the opening of the convention in Chicago, the telephone rang. It was Jimmy Byrnes calling from Washington. He told me that President Roosevelt had decided on him as the new nominee for Vice President, and he asked me if I would nominate him at the convention. I told him that I would be glad to do it if the President wanted him for a running mate.

At the time Byrnes called, Henry Wallace was widely considered to be the leading candidate for the vice-presidential nomination, and there was no doubt that he wanted very much to remain Vice President. Still a favorite with President Roosevelt, Wallace also had the almost solid support of labor. His only real opposition was in the South, where he was looked upon by many as a dangerous radical. It was in the South that Byrnes expected to get his biggest push. Wallace, moreover, was not popular as Vice President either in the Senate or with the politicians who ran things in the party organization. Therefore, when Byrnes called to tell me that Roosevelt had decided to have him on his ticket for his fourth term, I took it for granted that all the details had been arranged.

Before I left for Chicago, there was another call. It was Alben Barkley, the majority leader of the Senate, asking if I would nominate him for Vice President at the convention. I told him that Byrnes had just called me with the same request and that I had already promised to place his name before the convention.

When I arrived in Chicago, I had breakfast with Sidney Hillman, who was a power in the labor faction of the convention. I asked him if he would support Byrnes. He said he would not; there were only two men besides Henry Wallace he would support. They were William O. Douglas, justice of the Supreme Court, and Harry S. Truman, U.S. senator from Missouri. I told him that I was not a candidate and that I had agreed to nominate Byrnes because he told me the President wanted him.

Then I had a meeting with Phil Murray, head of the CIO, and one with A. F. Whitney, head of the Railroad Trainmen. Both expressed themselves exactly as Sidney Hillman had. The next morning William Green, head of the AFL, asked me to breakfast at the Palmer House. He told me that the AFL did not like Wallace and that they had decided to support me. I told him my position with Byrnes and repeated that I was not a candidate.

While we were talking, Senators Tydings and George Radcliffe came over to our table and asked me to come to their table to meet the Maryland delegation to the convention. I went over, thinking perhaps I could drum up some support for Byrnes. Tydings introduced me, however, as the Maryland candidate for Vice President. All I could do was to explain my position and return to finish my conversation with Green.

I reported all these conversations to Byrnes in detail. Every time I gave him the information, Byrnes told me just to wait, that the President would straighten everybody out in plenty of time.

On Tuesday evening of convention week, National Chairman Bob Hannegan came to see me and told me unequivocally that President Roosevelt wanted me to run with him on the ticket. This astonished me greatly, but I was still not convinced. Even when Hannegan showed me a longhand note written on a scratch pad from the President’s desk which said, “Bob, it’s Truman. F.D.R.,” I still could not be sure that this was Roosevelt’s intent, although I later learned that the handwriting in the note was the President’s own.

One thing that contributed to my confusion was my knowledge of a letter which the President had written earlier in which he stated that he would be satisfied with either Wallace or Douglas. He had also made a public statement to the effect that, if he were a delegate in the convention, he would personally vote for Wallace.

Another fact, which I did not learn until some time later, was that the President had called a meeting, far in advance of the Democratic convention, to discuss with party leaders the selection of a running mate. Among those present at the White House were Bob Hannegan, Ed Pauley, Frank Walker, George Allen, and Ed Flynn. It was at this meeting that Roosevelt told his conferees that he preferred Truman over Wallace, Douglas, or Byrnes, and jotted down the note in longhand which Hannegan was to show me at the convention. At the same meeting, he had instructed Walker to notify Byrnes of the decision. I believe, therefore, that Byrnes knew that the President had named me at the time he called me in Independence and asked me to nominate him at the convention.

Meanwhile, the Missouri delegation to the convention held its first meeting, and I was named chairman. The first item of business to come up was a resolution endorsing me for Vice President. In my capacity as presiding officer, I ruled the resolution out of order because I was not a candidate. Then someone called me to the door to pass on the admittance of a visitor. While my attention was thus diverted, the vice-chairman of the delegation, Sam Wear, put the motion to a question. I was unanimously endorsed by the Missouri delegation for the nomination to the vice-presidency.

In times gone by, the Missourians were always in a knockdown, drag-out fight, over what they wanted to do at Democratic conventions. That was the case in 1896, 1912, 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932. But this time, there was no fight over the choice for either chairman or nominee. I did not understand it.

On Thursday afternoon, the day before the Vice President was to be nominated, Hannegan called me from his room in the Blackstone Hotel and asked me to come to a meeting of the Democratic leaders. When I arrived there, they all began to put pressure on me to allow my name to be presented to the convention, but I continued to resist.

Hannegan had put in a long-distance telephone call to the President, who was in San Diego at the time. When the connection was made, I sat on one of the twin beds, and Hannegan, with the phone, sat on the other. Whenever Roosevelt used the telephone he always talked in such a strong voice that it was necessary for the listener to hold the receiver away from his ear to avoid being deafened, so I found it possible to hear both ends of the conversation.

“Bob,” Roosevelt said, “have you got that fellow lined up yet?”

“No,” Bob replied. “He is the contrariest Missouri mule I’ve ever dealt with.”

“Well, you tell him,” I heard the President say, “if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war, that’s his responsibility.”

With that, he banged down the phone. I was completely stunned. I sat for a minute or two and then got up and began walking around the room. All the others were watching me and not saying a word.

“Well,” I said finally, “if that is the situation, I’ll have to say yes, but why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”

My first act was to go over to the Stevens Hotel and report to Byrnes the President’s conversation with Hannegan and my decision to do what the President wanted. At this late hour of the convention, we had difficulty finding someone to nominate me. I had told all my friends that I was not a candidate, and they were now committed elsewhere. Finally, however, we persuaded Senator Bennett Clark to make the nominating speech. The following day I was chosen by the convention as its nominee for the vice-presidency of the United States.

The President sent the following message:

From the White House

Washington

July 21, 1944

TELEGRAM

Honorable Harry S. Truman

United States Senator

Stevens Hotel

Chicago, Illinois

I send you my heartiest congratulations on your victory. I am, of course, very happy to have you run with me. Let me know your plans. I shall see you soon.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

After the convention, I went to Washington for a visit with President Roosevelt. He told me that because he was so busy in the war effort I would have to do the campaigning for both of us, and we mapped out our program. I then resigned as chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program and made my plans to devote all my energy to the coming campaign.

The campaign of 1944 was the easiest in which I had ever participated. The Republican candidates never had a chance. As I traveled from one side of the continent to the other telling the people of the accomplishments of the Democratic administrations under President Roosevelt, I found little evidence of any inclination to change leaders during a war. In comparison with my own Senate campaigns, the job was easy. As the Democratic Party’s candidate for the vice-presidency, I could sincerely pledge my continued support to the policies of the administration. My voting records during both terms in the Senate showed that I had been faithful in support of those policies in the past.

I had no thought that in making this campaign for the President I was in reality doing so as much in my own behalf as in that of Roosevelt’s. At Lamar, Missouri, for instance, on August 31, 1944, I made the following, almost prophetic, statements:

“It takes time for anyone to familiarize himself with a new job. This is particularly true of the presidency of the United States, the most difficult and complex job in the world. Even in peacetime it is well-recognized that it takes a new President at least a year to learn the fundamentals of his job.

“We cannot expect any man wholly inexperienced in national and international affairs to readily learn the views, the objectives and the inner thoughts of such divergent personalities as those dominant leaders who have guided the destinies of our courageous allies. There will be no time to learn, and mistakes once made cannot be unmade. Our President has worked with these men during these trying years. He talks their language - the language of nations. He knows the reasons which govern their decisions. Just as he respects them and their opinions, so do they respect him. At no time in our history has the President possessed such knowledge of foreign leaders and their problems. None has ever so completely won their confidence and admiration.”

Without suspecting it, I was speaking of the tremendous job which, within a matter of months, was to be my own.

The rest is history. The official vote was 25,602,505, a plurality of 3,596,227 over the Republican ticket. On November 8, 1944, as Vice- President-elect of the United States, while resting at my home in Independence, I sent the following telegram to the President:

Honorable Franklin D, Roosevelt

President of the United States, Hyde Park, N.Y.

I am very happy over the overwhelming endorsement which you received. Isolationism is dead. Hope to see you soon.

Harry S. Truman

On January 20, 1945, a snowy Saturday, I stood on the south portico of the White House beside President Roosevelt for the third wartime inauguration in the history of our nation. The first had been Madison’s; the second, Lincoln’s. A crowd of several thousand had gathered on the White House lawn to witness the ceremony.

As is the custom, I moved first to the front of the platform between the national and the presidential flags to have Henry Wallace, the retiring Vice President, administer the oath of office to me. In a matter of minutes, I was the new Vice President of the United States. I stepped back, and President Roosevelt took his place at the front of the portico to receive the oath of office for his fourth term from Chief Justice Stone.

There was a post-inaugural White House luncheon after the conclusion of the President’s address and the ceremonies. I slipped away from the luncheon a few minutes ahead of time, hitchhiked a ride to Capitol Hill, and telephoned my mother at Grandview. She told me that she had heard the induction ceremony over the radio.

“Now you behave yourself,” she warned me.

One of my first duties as presiding officer of the Senate was to swear in Frank P. Briggs of Macon, Missouri, to serve out the two remaining years of my term as senator. Briggs, a newspaper publisher and former state senator, had been appointed by Governor Donnelly.

I enjoyed my new position as Vice President, but it took me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer had the voting privileges I had enjoyed for ten years as a senator. In the eighty-two days I served as Vice President I had only one chance to vote. That was on an amendment to limit the Lend-Lease extension bill; I broke the tie and defeated the proposal. The purpose of the amendment was to eliminate presidential power to carry out postwar Lend-Lease deliveries under contracts made during the war.

I was not given many other tasks. Two days after I became Vice President, Roosevelt left Washington for the Yalta conference, and during the short period I served as Vice President, he was not actually in the capital more than thirty days.

One particular job which I accomplished was to support the President’s appointment of Wallace as Secretary of Commerce. By overcoming the opposition of several senators, I was able to get the confirmation approved by a narrow vote. In fact, I twice saved Wallace from rejection by the Senate. On one of these occasions, his supporters had gained backing for him by agreeing to pass a House-approved measure divorcing the Department of Commerce from the Federal Loan Agency. Jesse Jones had been head of both, and the purpose of this measure was to get Wallace confirmed as Secretary of Commerce only, so that he would have no supervision over the billions of dollars lent by the loan agency. Under these terms, some senators who were otherwise opposed to Wallace promised to confirm him as Secretary.

Barkley was supposed to place the House-passed bill immediately before the Senate when it convened. With the bill once passed, the way would be clear for Wallace’s confirmation. But when I convened the Senate, Taft quickly demanded recognition and was prepared to move immediate action on Wallace’s nomination before the Senate could pass on the saving bill. I recognized Barkley first, however, and the agreed-upon procedure was followed. Otherwise Wallace’s confirmation would very probably have been rejected.

The office of Vice President, according to Woodrow Wilson, is “one of anomalous insignificance and curious uncertainty.” While this may have been its history, I did not feel that this was a fair description of what the office should be.

“I want,” I told newsmen shortly after being sworn in, “to bring the administration and Congress closer together on the methods of attaining the goal all of us have in common, and if I can create a better understanding, I feel that I can render an important public service.”

After taking the oath of office, the first traditional duty of the Vice President is to make a short inaugural address to the body whose President he is - the United States Senate. His position as presiding officer in the Senate is accorded him by the Constitution. The Senate is thus prevented from choosing its own chairman.

I felt that at all times the Vice President, in dealing with the Senate, must be a model of tact and forbearance. Custom brings him to include in his inaugural address some praise of the Senate and an appeal for cooperation. Some Vice Presidents, like John Adams, the first one, adopted a policy of extravagant praise in this inaugural address, and only Andrew Johnson and Charles G. Dawes ever departed from the general policy of addressing the Senate in complimentary terms.

In fact, Dawes made a speech to the Senate which practically ruined him as its presiding officer. On March 4, 1925, after he was sworn in, he took it upon himself to make a kind of inaugural address to the Senate. He criticized Senate rules. He told the Senate members what he, the Vice President, was going to do with them. He was just being the “Hell and Maria” Dawes he had been in Europe, where he had served so successfully as an important officer in the Service of Supply in World War I. He had done a good job there, but from the time he made that speech in the Senate, he had very little influence with that body or any of its members.

I had no procedural problem in my first contact with the Senate as its presiding officer. The rules of the Senate were not new to me. After ten years, I knew most of its members well. I spoke their language.

The tradition of vice-presidential deference to the Senate arose primarily because of the fact that the Vice President himself actually has very little power. He never engages in debate. As presiding officer he may make rulings, but any of these can be appealed and overruled. He does not appoint the committees in the Senate. Only in the period when Calhoun was Vice President were these appointments made by the President of the Senate, and Calhoun, therefore, was a power in that position. But this power was lost when it came to be the tradition for the Vice President to take his seat a few days after the beginning of a session.

As a moderator in debate, the Vice President executes only the most rudimentary of powers. He does maintain order and decorum in debate, and it is especially here that whatever tact he possesses is a decided asset. In this task he is helped and advised by the officers of the Senate, who may save him from traps into which the senators used to like to see their president fall, such as the calling of a senator to order for not speaking to the subject. A senator is privileged to talk on any subject he chooses, whenever he is recognized to speak. This is, unfortunately, one of the loose rules of the Senate.

Among the minor duties of a Vice President in the Senate is to swear in new senators. Even this task must proceed according to the established ritual. In taking it lightly, Dawes incurred fresh resentment on top of what came to him through his fruitless efforts to change the Senate’s rules. On the occasion of his first session with the Senate, it was his duty to swear in twenty-two new senators-elect. It was customary for the new senators to be conducted to the desk in groups of four, but after less than half of them had been inducted in the usual form, Dawes became impatient and he cried out, “Bring them all up. This is too slow. Bring them on together.”

Under the Constitution, the powers of the Vice President are defined in only one respect: the right to vote in case of a tie. This right, however, has not been exercised very often. A few Vice Presidents never did have an occasion to vote in the Senate. Others voted only a few times. John Adams voted more often than any other Vice President, twenty-nine times.

In view of all this, the Vice President can never exercise open influence in the Senate, but if he is respected personally and if he maintains good relations with the members of the Senate, he can have considerable power behind the scenes. Because the Senate has a president pro tempore to take the chair in his absence, the Vice President does not have to attend the sessions of the Senate continuously. Thus he may devote part of his time to private meetings, conferences, and other valuable contacts with leaders and committeemen.

A good deal of the Vice President’s functions are social and ceremonial. Very often he acts as a substitute for the President in opening an exposition, dedicating a monument, or in cutting the ribbon to open a new bridge to traffic. Outranking foreign ambassadors, he is almost always the most important guest at a dinner or other social functions. Socially the Vice President takes precedence over all other officers of the government except the President. I never cared too much for this aspect of my job as Vice President.

The Vice President is not an officer of the executive branch of the government and therefore does not attend Cabinet sessions, except at the invitation of the President. The history of the office shows that the Vice President has rarely been used for executive work except where his relations with the President were unusually intimate. I was fortunate to attend the few Cabinet meetings that were held between January and March, to report legislative conditions to the President. I also attended all meetings of the Big Four when they called on the President.

The great importance of the office of Vice President, of course, lies in the possibility of his succeeding to the presidency. So far in the history of the United States, Presidents have been removed from office only by death. On these occasions, the Vice President has taken the oath of office immediately on notification of the death of the President.

The Constitution provides that the powers and duties of the office of President “shall devolve upon the Vice President” in case of the removal from office of the President, his resignation, or his inability to discharge his powers and duties. Johnson was in danger of removal by impeachment, and Washington and Wilson were said to have thought of resigning, but the issue of succession under such circumstances has never come up. There were a number of unanswered questions concerning presidential succession. I turned my attention to these shortly after I became President myself.

It has always been my feeling that this office, which is the second highest honor that can be bestowed by the American people, has great inherent and potential dignity that has been sadly neglected. The opportunities afforded by the vice-presidency, particularly the presidency of the Senate, do not come - they are there to be seized. The man who fills the office can choose to do little, or he can do much. The Vice President’s influence on legislation depends on his personality and his ability, and especially the respect which he commands from the senators. Here is one instance in which it is the man who makes the office, not the office the man.

Ordinarily a Vice President has four years to develop these opportunities. I had less than three months. After April 12, 1945, I never again had the time even to speculate on what I might have been able to do with the office of Vice President. I no longer found myself amid the familiar surroundings of Capitol Hill. I was President.